Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 808 and 810

Qualcomm has lifted the kimono on the latest members of its Snapdragon mobile chip range.

The Snapdragon 810 has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 paired alongside four Cortex-53 CPUs. The cores will support the asymmetric operating modes that ARM came up with in 2013. This means the chip won’t be limited to using either four Cortex-A57s or four Cortex-A53’s but can allocate workloads to all eight cores simultaneously.

The 808 uses a similar design but the core layouts will be asymmetric. It will have two Cortex-A57’s paired with four Cortex-A53’s.

Both SoC’s will use a 20nm radio and a 28nm RF transceiver which represents a move for Qualcomm away from 40nm for RF circuits.

The Snapdragon 810 will use the Adreno 430 GPU, which is an improvement on the Snapdragon 805 / Adreno 420. The 430 can support LPDDR4 which will result in improved power savings while holding total platform memory bandwidth constant relative to the Snapdragon 805.

The new chip also runs OpenGL ES 3.1 and Qualcomm’s first video support for H.265 encode and decode in hardware. It can manage 4K video playback at up to 30fps, 1080p playback at 120fps, and a dual 14-bit image sensor with support for 55 megapixels.

The Snapdragon 808 has an Adreno 418, GPU which is not as good as Adreno 420 in the current 805. It will probably be slightly slower than the version Qualcomm is using today but should be able to manage the same graphics performance.

The 810 will also support display-out via HDMI 1.4a or 1080p60 Miracast at a 3:1 pixel compression ratio.